Mark Mahaffey’s map for Virgin Queen depicts Europe as percieved by Spainish ruler Philip II, resulting in a much larger Netherlands
In their book Characteristics of Games, George Skaff Elias, Richard Garfield and K. Robert Gurschera present a fascinating table with a rather dull name. Their “Scale of Intensity for Conceits” ranks, one through ten, games with no conceit (one) to full-blown simulation (ten). At one extreme sit purely abstract games such as tic-tac-toe, Scrabble and Othello, in the middle Cluedo and Monopoly, and at the other games that minimise unrealistic elements, such as the full-on tabletop simulation Squad Leader. While readers might quibble about the relative positions on the table – is chess more or less abstract than Donkey Kong? – the exploration of the connection of games and their conceits (perhaps more easily understood as ‘themes’) proves instructive. In abstract games they argue that the conceit is almost entirely absent (chess is “vaguely about medieval warfare”) while simulation games model their conceits and the real world as closely as possible, often through extensive rulesets.
In order to think through the connections of games and the worlds that they simulate, consider literary realism – that form of fiction that came to prominence in the 19th century and which largely informs the kinds of books that many of us read today. What is interesting about realism is that it is a literary form with conventions of its own and only an imagined connection to the world that it purports to represent. As literary critic Christopher Keep puts it: “Realism can never fully offer up the world in all its complexity. […] Its verisimilitude is an effect achieved through the deployment of certain literary and ideological conventions.” In other words, realist literature is not a mirror held up to nature, but a carefully crafted representation of the world. Something similar might be said of games that, in their attempts to simulate reality, necessarily focus on certain elements at the exclusion of others. As Fire in the Sky designer Tetsuya Nakamura notes, “We cannot capture all possible information in a game; for example, we cannot include all soldiers, weapons, food and fuel supplies, fatigue levels, and so on. Therefore, in most games we must simplify and abstract […] to focus on the important information and round off the inconsequentialities.”